Hospital's open doors applauded

Report gives St. Peter's a "10" for its policy on visiting hours

Updated 10:09 pm, Wednesday, August 8, 2012

ALBANY — Anyone who has spent a night in the hospital knows the value of a familiar face in an often forbidding environment. A new report suggests that some hospitals understand that value more than others.

St. Peter's Hospital in Albany earned top marks for its patient visitation policies in "Sick, Scared, and Separated from Loved Ones," a report released Wednesday by New Yorkers for Patient and Family Empowerment and the New York Public Interest Research Group. The medical advocates point to the correlation between liberal visitation policies and the quality of care a patient receives — not to mention the patient's reduced level of stress.

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At a glance

Here are the scores (ranging from 1 to 10) for Capital Region hospitals examined in the report "Sick, Scared, and Separated from Loved Ones," based on analysis of a facility's visiting hours policy and how well that information is communicated on the hospital's website:

HospitalVisiting hours flexibility Online info

Albany Medical Center 4 3

Samaritan Hospital, Troy 4 1

Saratoga Hospital 3 5

St. Peter's Hospital, Albany 10 8

Ellis Hospital, Schenectady 1 8

Overall, the report found that visiting policies for large hospitals in New York have wide disparities in access rules and "disturbing flaws in communication that run afoul of new state and federal regulations on the right of patients to have visitors."

It found that 22 percent of hospital policies don't provide any regular visiting hours in the morning — a period when many medical errors can occur — and fail to indicate any flexibility for visits by a patient's primary support person outside of regular hours.

St. Peter's employs what's known as an "open" policy that allows for the 24-hour presence of a "support person," who might or might not be a relative, as well as flexibility according to the patient's condition. The policy, the report notes, shouldn't be taken as an open-door policy and may include "quiet times" when no visitors are allowed.

"Part of our whole mission is that we're not just treating the patient, we're treating the whole family — and we define family very broadly," said Kathleen Brodbeck, vice president and chief nursing officer of St. Peter's.

She emphasized that flexible visiting arrangements are not to be taken as license for "social hour."

"It's not one-size-fits-all," she said, offering the example of a greater need for a trusted friend or loved one during meal times. And enforcement is rarely an issue: "People don't abuse it; they're very respectful," Brodbeck said.

Suzanne Mattei of Patient and Family Empowerment, one of the authors of the report, praised St. Peter's as the report's "top dog" for taking the initiative to alert patients to the new federal requirement that any hospital receiving Medicaid or Medicare funds — virtually all caregivers of any size — have to allow patients to determine who makes up their support network, essentially striking down any rules that would deny non-blood relatives (ranging from same-sex partners to neighbors or rabbis) from serving in that role.

Nevertheless, the report found that 23 of the hospitals included in the study limited certain types or times of visitation to various categories of "family," and three adding only the category of "significant other" — an apparent contradiction of the federal edict.

Four hospitals received a score of zero, indicating that they offered less than eight hours of visiting per day and failed to indicate any flexibility on those policies in their online information.

St. Peter's also was among the top scorers in the report's assessment of how well hospitals communicate their visitation policies on their websites. While no facility scored a perfect 10 in that measurement, St. Peter's was among eight sites that received a score of 8.

Also in the Capital Region, Ellis Hospital in Schenectady scored a meager 1 for its policies but a high score of 8 for how well it communicated.

Albany Medical Center, the largest health care entity in the region, received a score of 4 for its visiting hours policy's flexibility and a 3 for the availability of information about its visiting policies on its website — although the report notes that the hospital has recently improved its online offerings.

The hospital issued a statement that said it recognizes "the critical importance of having loved ones close at hand and make(s) every effort to accommodate individual patients' desires to have family and friends of their choosing at their side any time of the day or night. In fact, our Children's Hospital and our ICUs frequently make accommodations for family members to stay round-the-clock in the hospital with a patient until they are well."